English Studies Forum

In Memoriam to Identity: Re(w)riting and (Re)membering Kathy Acker

 Doug Rice

Kathy wrote to me from Tahiti. Using ink and skin, she discovered her way for becoming my body without reflections. I followed the riverrun of her fingers as her desire for speech edged closer to my flesh. We sat on the floor of our kitchen. A stillness filled with wanting she pulled skin away from her bones. Bit at the hard skin around her fingernails. To break open. Inside the practice of breathing, we sought torn doorways. Places for becoming presence. Kathy looked across the space between us, spaces that separated our bodies. She looked over at me, her sweet, scribble boy in a white dress. A dull looking-glass nailed to a tree. She desired blackberry stains and lived inside the need for a return to the ocean. Rocks she carried in the palms of her hands. Kathy dreamt of the muscles of horses, dreamt of her desire to run into water.  To stay inside her bleeding. To remain still with her blood. She wanted to find those places where language had been written in her body. Letters and bones. I longed for her to stain my skin with the red of her movement.

In between the spaces of breathing, we spoke. Our words, episodic and guilty, at times false and uncertain or unlikely as a photograph taken in a moment of haste, became the shredded remains of our unfound desire. Rain collected and then discarded by a voice imitator. Some girl lost in the forest near a lake found our words on her skin and began translating each mark one by one. Writing. Coming. Her tongue. The scratches that bled into the roof of her mouth. “I will now carry you inside me.” I stepped out of the shower, but tripped. The clawfoot bathtub too deep. My body clumsy and old with desire.  Our laughter in the morning made wet by false memories. “Tell me a story from your wrists.”  The words that had fallen from my mouth settled on her skin. We waited on the balcony for more rain. Longed for bold clouds and sounds of thunder. Captured by this wanting, this waiting, I became a living border changed by contact with her body. To listen to her making stories. Her hand on my shoulder took me to this place. Here. The weight of her hand on my back. A body of desire. She waited in her body. “The story I wanted,” I tell her. “From my childhood.” She unlocked my dreaming as a girl. We are unwritten sisters. Our difficult love that confused my skin. To place these words from this mouth born in the desert close to her flesh. Beneath denim. To write on the inside of her clothes. I have written words down for you.

Miles and miles of roads and wires. Telephone wires that only carried literal messages. We were left alone in our skin. Longing. The subterranean cries of desperation buried in static. A gentle cure for suffocation. My voice and her skin on the edge of the wilderness. Writing each other in and out of our bodies. Kathy and I became lost to space and time.

“I want,” she said, “to place my hands around your throat. I want to experience the pressure of your speech the moment before I hear you saying.” I still feel her presence around my neck, my collarbone. To this day I wear this pressure. Her. Here. Near my neck. This ring on my finger. The rope she made.

“I hear you pushing your way through my skin from dreams.” The haunted moment before the sun breaks into me. A tiny song that moves in the breeze, that cuts through berry patches. Blue stains on our shirts that want to cry but can find no tears. Just a tearing into a silent body. I write from the inside out. “Do not hesitate until the flower bleeds.” But each month I disappoint you with not-bleeding. The anxiety of the orchard. The scent of eucalyptus near her thigh. Jasmine behind her ear. “Dear Kathy,“ I write on a small piece of paper, “why do you get to be a girl?” In forgotten time, Kathy touches my lips. The blisters of her smell. This music in letters that opens my legs to her breathing. For her breath that haunts my skin. Loose and abandoned words that want to be somewhere escape my voice. Flee.

“I no longer trust God.”

Near midnight Kathy and I walk into the deserted city. We pick up what others have left behind, have thrown away. We fill our pockets with discarded moments from the lives of thoughtless people. Paperclips, rubber bands, soiled paper. Dusty locks of hair. Our dance of fragments given over to the rhythms of debris.  We find a perfect tomato sitting so still that we thought that the world had ended. We think of knocking on doors to find the owner of the perfect tomato. But then Kathy bites into it. Her gold tooth in red.

She faded away from the present into color. Her skin covered with chills. Her body, just by looking, came to the thrill of desperation. Goosebumps on her arm. Her desires became red and she walked down some lonely path. Kathy entered a distance. Came closer to her own difficulty. Left streets littered with remains from careless dreams. She tore away soft edges. The corners of her mouth. Be with me tonight. Stay here with me. I have lost this. At the crossroads. To return to origins through languages. To revive the space that has been made to disappear at the moment of blood.

Kathy gave me skin.

I go to the river, am drawn to the river, carry my body to the river, because it is the beginning without words. Run out of Etna, down to the Allegheny. The calm water that deceives me. That disguises its desires. Caelia tells me stories of water and dolphins. These words in time in place allow her to become water. She rocks her body. The rhythm of her seeing the world, hearing the world with this return to breathing.

In a dream I saw a way to survive the breaking of this body into loss. So we stood barefoot near the edge. Near some edge along a river. In mud. No one saw us. Or, if anyone saw us, we no longer cared about their seeing. Only our bodies inside this space here. Water moves over our bodies. To become awake on the inside of skin. Her body alert to this becoming. Brings us to a present. To live with water washing our skin. I want to come to your body with my body. To come near your skin. To wound. To seize. I take hold of your bones. You close your mouth. Somehow you keep your eyes open and you see something blue. She once told me that I could make her come to blood just by touching her skin. That with each touch she began bleeding.

This forgery of forgetting.

Kathy took me by her hand. Led me into an awkward land to live among lost souls. And we walked down the empty streets, cold, in Providence. To find the ocean. To step into movement. I am bleeding tonight. My body is unable to reject her way for speaking. The words she says wait on the floor. Like her words, she wants to serve. To survive. “I know this desire,” Kathy says, “to be owned. To be placed.”  There is an antagonism between body and language. I am separated. Someone had broken into her body in an ungodly manner. Kathy became distressed by this slash. The fold. A thousand and one ways for saying. The new moon slices the dark sky. I can see the fold. The gaping wound. Flooded by rituals. She comes and goes. Condemned to say nothing but the same word. Again and again. The breakdown in repetition. The sight unseen. Unknown. In the same motion. I becoming lost without following. Uncertain girls with fragile hands led me to this other place where bodies have been rejected, expelled. We were on the outside. Orphans interrupted by sudden memories. The shock of recognition beneath naked feet.

Lose your dream, I once tell her before she leaves, and your skin decays. Promise to push your fingers into sand. To build castles too close to the tides.  She asks me to feel her blood. Touch. Longs to have my fingers near her skin. The ruin of the years that have passed over her body. “I am too dry.” Her small hand on her forehead. Old from the sun. “I don’t have good skin.” I reach toward her soft body. Lost in the night. Promise not to ever forget writing. To write this body into. Her words come from places that break. Places that surprise her and too often are caught in her throat. They stay there. Unsaid remains. I can’t stay. The movement of her hand over the page. Our skin. Writing is not skin. I can’t. She is heading south. San Diego then Tijuana. Going away. Distance. There at last my body will cure itself. Will write itself. No need for me to speak. I want my body to take over writing. “I will,” she promises. But she promises in the same words. Words repeated. There is too much silence between each word. Not the divine silence of breathing, but the empty silence. Lost trust. Her saying. To write is to take one’s leave. To go someplace. Writing contains an inside and outside within itself. Away from itself.

Her hands shake.

Broken pieces of yesterday’s dreams. Mad visions from the 1970s rush back to me with a vengeance. I am 17 again and lining up my first shot. Speedballing. Tapping my fingers on the sidewalk to some song ripping my blood. Warm bottles of beer with the labels peeled off. Beers hotter than the day. Sweating humidity. Musty girls lie with us on the concrete streets looking into the dark city night. Perfect beads of sweat on their foreheads. Girls that want to dye my hair. They offer to do tricks with their tongues. They lift their tongues with sweet innocence. The perfect edge of their smiles. “Put the needle here, sweet boy.” We are in a back alley off Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh. A night of elbows and skinny knees. Shooting hoops with the boys. Jeep and The Doctor pull out Sweet Baby Jane. A velvet cloth and sharp needles. Have a little fun before we die. I bite into my wrist. Julianne at my feet. Lovesick girl with her mouth and teeth. I want to stay there with her. The sugar of Julianne’s mouth. All through her blood. We were young and beyond love. Just bodies in flight without a word. She told me she knew of a desert. A place of endless skin where the sun feels like sex on our bodies. A place where a grain of sand on the tip of your tongue is like a purple dot on a tiny square of paper. To disorder the world. Julianne presses her mouth against my mouth. And we climb the city trees.

“Come live with me in the water,” she says. “Through the fence there is life in the water. Be careful with the stones, though. They are slippery.” Bare feet and the need to speak. Her distant voice through turbulent water. Near her skin, I have become less familiar with myself than with the ocean. In her arms. A deserted beach in the middle of the desert. Arizona. I force my way into the water, liquid, yet resilient. Light and sharp my body hesitates before entering. A fertile terror. As in loving where resistance is often an act of pleading. To return to the dreams of oceans and her skin.

A young woman lingers. Wanting. To travel down corridors with invisible doors. But she could not wait. She ran down some narrow hallway. Locked doors. A man is chasing her. But we never see this man. We can only know that this man wants to destroy her. I wait in this place where the sun never shines. Flowing white curtains. Spring rain and that breeze off the coast. The disturbed chaos of an Argento film.

I want the spaces to speak. I want to show you.

There.

I carve her face in pavement.

 “Look between these spaces.”

I saw men dressed in scarlet robes. Red and red and more red. So much red so deep into their skins that they were nearly invisible in their own body. Men tearing apart tiny girls dressed in white. Girls we could not rescue. I sleep in this place. I wait.

I have written this on my body for you to remember.

Little by little I want my body to disappear. To beg the truth. The unbearable pressure of Kathy’s flesh bears down on me. To covet her body with marks of ink. Years later I hear voices. Liberation from silence. The determination to survive.

Kathy used her fingers at the edge of what she remembered. A memory that had nothing to do with her skin. Only with words. She had been forced to believe in her faith in the past, of the past, as fluid as any word slipping between wet lips. To be rescued. Approaching pain gave Kathy a way of remembering her flesh. “Do this for me. I want you to see me. Look at me. I want the outside to be like my inside. This red.” The inside of her mouth a red scar opened.

For five days she bleeds. I cut into my own skin to try to make bleeding. She bleeds without will. I cannot will myself into blood. Pray to God for a blood that never dies. Her blood is of the earth. My fingers move into her. This stream of her becoming. She changes, she says, with each drop of blood.

You don’t mind the blood? My blood. There. 

Her bleeding comes out of the blue. Down from the mountains. “This secretion of skin and blood. To secrete from my bleeding, through my bleeding into blood. I can no longer enter speech.” We tell secrets beneath the sheets. Our bodies share words. We can trust only the night. In blindness we listen to mad hallucinations. We never were the kind of girls to take home. Touch me here. She pulls my hand to her. To here. In this white room we rest with her bleeding. This hunger.

To speak of this secret is to say nothing.

“I want,” Caelia tells me, “to have a tattoo of a tattoo of Kathy cut into me. For the archaeology of her life to become my skin. Did the ink from Kathy’s tattoos ever get into her blood? Her stream? The flow, the pull of her life? I want marks, Doug. The physical markings, these remains of our desires. If this be your will, to put your muscle into my muscle. To not let me breathe.” She picked at the dirt on her hand. Skin. I cover her mouth with my hand and we become still. This comfort of darkness. The shadow of her desires. When she writes on her stomach, she slashes through being to begin to move to becoming.

"I wanted," I told her, "to travel with you, to travel blind."

By chance, I watch her eyes as she continues to journey from here to here. Never to go to there but only to move through there to here. Caelia is always in motion. The continual fixation of the visionary. Caelia watches a mirage take form. Birds being born without names. Desires without words. Flowers between our fingers. Her need for water draws her to this rhythm. Becoming. We are walking down a busy street in Sacramento at dusk. Her body dances with each step. I wander. We are leaving this place and becoming the music of chance. The trees are everywhere. Water falls onto the grass. The smell of damp soil through our bodies.

“I would have to find Kathy’s tattoo artist. The one she dedicated Empire of the Senseless to. He would know.”

“I want to rename the myths. Speak them in new ways, Doug.”  Caelia is walking. She is telling me her stories from the water. From Placerville, the hills outside Sacramento. “To live through it.” I had become forgetful and was uncertain of what she meant. Of what her voice could mean. Her mouth. The complicated fluidity of her mouth. This birthing of words becoming. Near the skin. To say. Or, I simply had not heard one of her words when a truck rushed past. “I want that trust,” Caelia said. “To give my body over to the writing. My identity to the visions of the artist.” Kathy had once told me of the incredible trust of permitting an artist to write into her skin. Her body becoming I. She attracted me into this thought that I had forgotten. With this memory I come to her from across the sand.

Writing besieged me, took me by surprise. I could not refuse. This refusal of my body to make words. Writing through following is a becoming revelation. To dress the body in revelation. To reveal this body of language through skin. Not an exhibitionism that calls attention to itself. That demands to be looked at. This is the writing that cannot be said through skin because the body is not subtle enough. This is the writing that can only be written. The body becoming an image of betrayal. The voice of Caelia’s breath breaks through resistance.

If we could only discover boundaries. To trespass identifications, any desire that fixes one permanently in one mould. One place without hope for change. To wait. Songs that we could sing. In her mouth, I found gifts. Small words only released slowly in the morning before the sun. But these words panic. Runaway. To always face the present, to move into and through that language of here. We wanted in our deepest places to carry language beyond the sentence but we also wanted to stay. Here. I begin sentence after sentence that I am unable to complete. I imagine that she waits for the ends of these sentences. That she stands on some beach waiting. I want to make you a child again. We swam. We walked endlessly, tirelessly along a dirty beach. Washed our feet in the water as we danced.

She disappeared from here and passed into forgetfulness. I was no longer permitted to remember. “you can understand this love only by being betrayed by it.” She is speaking slowly to me on the phone. Each word a space opening and closing. To fall into sleep with her voice.

Caelia kept words on the inside. Her body on the inside. Words of her own embodiment. She wore her words inside her flesh in the making of speech. She always needed to force her words to come. To experience her words through her body. Caelia wanted to bring the words forward that had been forgotten in her body. By her body. She wanted to write on the inside. To remain on the inside coming. Bruised muscles tired from the mountains and oceans.

“Yeah, someone wrote on me,” Kathy says, “which is pretty incredible.”

“Did you ever touch Kathy bleeding?” Caelia looks into some river. She wants to find a mirror. Red and living blood. I can’t begin to speak from within this unknown. “Did Kathy ever write in her blood?” These are the reflections that survive. I still smell her torn hair. “The sun did this.” On my skin. Fingernails that have been broken. “Bleeding can be a cure for our need.” My knuckles infected. This intimate desire tears away at my nerves. She hands me a shirt stained with her menstrual blood. In the beginning. “Here the beginning can only be present,” Caelia says. “So words cannot write the beginning. A beginning has no speech.” Red and quivering. Bone-deep desires. “I'm a lucky girl.” She sends words across the continent.

Caelia taught her wounds to become wet.

To trust this journey outside our sentence. To be the barbarian of my body. Not to play with words. All those pretty words on some string that breaks. But to find the languages that bear down into the skin.

My skin.

This deep and unrelenting pleasure to write in and around your text. Sugar lives there. Grace finds beauty and my legs weaken. The movement of your hands on this skin.

I want my body defined by pain and ink. "I know your writing in me like blood. I don't know why. This flame under my skin."

“To become devoured by this writing. Rather than eat, I desire to be eaten. I want to carry Kathy on me.” Caelia kneels. She touches wet stone. “My story in this life,” Caelia says, without looking up to me, “the matter of this is what has been ciphered onto my body. The body. My body. I want the tattoo of Kathy’s tattoo of a tattoo of Kathy to continue to talk, to narrate the incident responsible for its inscription.”

I beg her to press her thumb into my bicep. Or her teeth. Her teeth into my skin. The remembrance of things passing. Pain condemned to the failure of memory. We take a slow look at our remains. Memories lie most in buried fears. Memory beneath the skin. Nothing was ever so gentle as the way that Caelia pushed me to forgetting. Sitting on the balcony with our feet in the air. Her provocative ankle. The bone that waits. Lost time and a wet Corona. A half-hour late for some reading. In the breath before the music ends, the desert sky turns cold. We try to stand up. Our bodies fall.

We hold in this present the memory of what orgasm forgets. The forgeries of breathing. Her mouth opens. Mine. Our mouths close. "To orgasm," Kathy says, "I do not want to have to fall prey to forgetting. I want this, the pressure of your body into my body, to come to remembering. I want to maintain a separation between past and future. The island of this. Of being here."

The palm of Caelia’s hand waits. Her mouth, salt water. “Are we forgetting here, Doug?” For a moment that becomes invisible, I see my gaze trapped. Light projected harshly. Light concentrated on her jaw. A disappearance of contours. We plunged into the night of ink. I struggled to separate my eyes from what I saw. “I cannot free myself from the blue shock of your eyes.” Have we forgotten? Caelia’s eyes had come to know something about breath. The breathing of language in seeing. Her eyes left a memory that stirred the ruins of my past to life. A wild rebellion against my own sense of desires. You have seen something others have not seen. Something there in her eyes that I could not feel yet. In this body. Something she had seen but could not break open into words. Her mouth close to my eyes. This voice that matches these eyes. Her smooth skin flushed with sun and pleasure.

We dream like infidels. We dream of a book that is locked inside a movie. And we travel becoming for this moment nomadic. A time of oblivion and thunder bursts forth.

“That’s what I mean by primitive,” Kathy tells me. “You don’t quite know where the world is.” I want you to break that twig from the tree. I need you to hit me. Kathy cries, her voice cracking open, "Does this pain have any good? Does memory which is painful have any good?" We cannot forget. Our hands try to become forgetful.

I watched the visible beauty of Caelia forgetting. All that you can’t leave behind. “Forgetting,” Caelia says, “is always already there before we forget. Forgetting can not just appear.” Our wrists somehow touch. “Forgetting is present in each word.”

You have not forgotten enough.